Is Universal Credit Worth Saving?

The National Audit Office (NAO) report ‘Universal Credit: Early Progress’ was as damning as is possible for such a report to be. It criticised the governance, planning and oversight of the whole project, whose initial timetable has slipped alarmingly and final delivery date of next Autumn looks exceptionally optimistic.  Replacing six benefits with one is not as simple as it seems. Paying the housing element to the claimant is less simple than paying it to the landlord. And what UC simplifies, the bedroom tax and localisation of council tax support make complicated again.  At what point are gains outweighed by the losses? UC is currently in its pilot phase, and some of the data coming out of these pilots, particularly regarding the housing benefit aspects, is pretty worrying. UC was oversold as a silver bullet to tackle poverty/worklessness/ benefit dependency, call it what you want. But the benefit system has only ever been one part of the problem, and reducing efforts to tackle such issues to a piece of software was always going to fall short. Read more on the New Policy Institute website.